Inter-departmental dysfunction is never because of a lack of communication

Whenever there is interdepartmental dysfunction - and let's be honest, there always is, particularly once a PE firm has acquired the business and everything gets a bit more real - the temptation is to assign the blame to poor communication. More town halls. A better intranet. Clearer messaging from the top.

The trouble with this diagnosis is that, as the psychologist David Schnarch observed, people are always communicating. Silence is communication. Passive aggression is communication. Tone of voice, body language, the decision to reply to an email three days late - all of it is communication. We just don't like what it's communicating.

Interdepartmental dysfunction is rarely a communication problem. It's a trust problem. It isn't safe to communicate clearly and honestly. The problem is simpler than poor communication and at the same time harder to fix - people don't trust each other enough to tell the truth.

Patrick Lencioni identified this as the first of his Five Dysfunctions for a reason. Without trust, there's no real conflict. And by conflict, I don't mean hostility. I mean honest feedback - the kind that confronts the gap between where a team is and where it needs to be. Without that, problems don't get named. They get papered over until performance takes a hit and the CEO gets involved.

So how do you build trust between people who've decided, consciously or not, that honesty isn't safe?

You engineer a vulnerability loop.

Daniel Coyle writes about this in The Culture Code. Most people operate on the assumption that trust comes first - "once they show me I can trust them, then I will." It doesn't work like that. Trust is built through small acts of vulnerability that are met with safety rather than attack. Someone takes a small risk. The group responds well. The threshold for the next risk lowers. You build from there.

The design of the session matters more than most people think. I always try to get the group out of the office. The building carries the habits of how people normally behave in it.

The first thing I do is the seating plan. No one sits next to someone from their own team. It sounds trivial. It isn't. It changes who people talk to before we start, over coffee, at lunch. Those conversations are part of the work.

Before we get into anything substantive, I ask everyone to share something personal. Not sensitive, not professional. My favourite question is: what's something about you that no one in this room knows? There are always laughs. People turn out to be more interesting than their job titles suggest.

Then I'm direct about what we're actually doing and why it feels uncomfortable. Naming the dynamic takes more heat out of it than any amount of careful framing.

From there, I'll give the group a feedback framework to hold onto when the conversation gets hard. But the framework is scaffolding. The real work is pushing for honesty on something that actually matters - a real problem these teams are genuinely stuck on. That way we leave with two things: a bit more trust, and something useful for the business.

The hardest part isn't the content. It's the sequencing. Too fast and the first act of vulnerability gets met with silence, which sets the wrong precedent. Too slow and you never get to the honest conversation. Knowing which way to push, and when, is most of the job.